What's your process?

[Chilari]

So you're going to write a story. How do you go about it? What elements do you consider? In what order do you consider plot, characters and world? How much do you think about meeting personal goals with the story, like putting in your own beliefs and ideals explicitly or implicitly (for example, do you consciously consider diversity in characters, specific ideological messages, and so on?) What element of the story do you consider the "core" around which other elements are built up (a theme, a relationship between characters, a scene, a twist, etc)? How much outlining do you do and in what format do you do it?

 

[Feo Takahari]

The very first elements I consider are basic protagonist personalities. Situation comes next, and larger world-building comes in either as it impacts the situation, or as I write.

Most of the time, any message I want to pass on is integrated into the premise, such that I'd need to have that message in order to write the story. The one thing I go out of my way to do is to create patterns between the characters that show different variations on the theme--for instance, if my story's about identity issues, all my characters will have different issues related to their identities.

I've been outlining more, but it's generally just a few sentences for each chapter. I'll go off-outline if I get a better idea.

Ultimately, the characters, not the message, are the core of my stories. After all, putting different characters into the same situation produces different messages.

 

[Jackarandajam]

The most important part of the process, i think, is capturing every idea in writing. when that dream wakes you up, or you're watching a movie and it brings back some childhood fantasy that suddenly makes sense again, WRITE IT DOWN. Then you start to organize all the ideas…
then characters spring from the creative slosh in your mind, and the end, or the beginning, or the middle, begins to fall into place.
fragmented piece by fragmented piece, the plot grows.

What's missing now?

Hmmm… Pirates! Yes, i need pirates in this story… a woman pirate, but not a standard "I'm a feminist, men suck, I'm beautiful and deadly" kind of woman pirate… lets make her crazy. So a pirate, but a woman- a woman, but a silent/excitable/schitzo woman pirate- crazy, but lets give her a parrot. we can get away with that, since we've avoided so much cliche already… a parrot, but a killer parrot! yeah, cause honesty, who would carry around a useless pet in this time… an eye gouging parrot on the solder of a psycho woman pirate. Not too shabby.

how do i introduce her now?
do i kill her? do i know yet?
who does she get along with, if anyone?
Do i have to create a character for her to love/hate?

So i have the basic plot, and usually a great idea for either the end, the beginning, or some twist in the story… and most of the internal details have to do with character interaction. Most of what's left is twist. How do I intertwine what's happening in this novel and with these characters into the bigger world I'm creating? What ship is the pirate from? Is it notorious? What about her nemesis/ally? Is there bigger picture backstory there?

I could go on and on!

 

[Butterfly]

My first task is to outline the groups, who is working with who and where they are. I have the main protagonist group, the antagonist group, and then any extra players that might make an appearance. The important thing to do with them, once they are organised, is to work out their goals, and to write out the key events of their stories in a rough outline. When I've done that I can plot them on a time line and fill in the gaps of what needs to happen to get from A to D, as well as working out the travelling times. It also allows me to see where the groups collide and where they don't and where something needs to happen to incite the key events. Then I take the time line and outline the infills. When that's done, I start work writing up those key events and build outwards in both directions until I have a complete draft. (I very rarely write chronologically). After draft one it's time for draft two where I create a scene map. Here, I'm looking for any illogical occurrences and usually end up restructuring large sections of the plot. This will also call for a new timeline... Then it's time for draft three... then four...

 

[Sam Evren]

I don't know if this is strange; it seems strange to me. Anyway, here goes...

When I was younger, I had problems developing overall "plots." I could be given 3 distinct words and come up with a story around them, but if I had to write from utter scratch, I stalled. I suppose I "tried too hard." I was trying to force ideas that didn't want to come.

The first idea I had that actually survived into being a novel came to me when I was walking. I just "saw" the scene in the middle of a very long walk. It was one scene, that to me, needed a book to make it live.

Since then, I've had that happen a few more times. The ideas I finish, the books I know I'll write started with seeing one scene.

After I have that scene, these days, I fire up OneNote and keep a running set of notes on everything that occurs to me (In the past, I kept physical notebooks, but I work faster when I type). I keep separate tabs of outlines, characters, places, scenes, "to do" lists, and random thoughts.

I find that doing things that occupy my hands---like washing the dishes, or knitting---help my mind work out details more fluidly. Problems that seem to be tied up in Gordian Knots are sliced away seemingly without effort. I had a friend of mine teach me to knit on an opera many years back so I could make Christmas presents for folks that year. I'm not good at it, but I can make a straight line scarf or blanket. It's crazy how much of your mind that frees up for creative thought.

After that, it's a matter of setting aside time in the day to write. I try to get into a rhythm or schedule to write 5 days a week. I'm not nearly above offering myself either a carrot-on-a-stick---or withholding my supper (figuratively speaking, needs to be more important than supper)---to keep to that schedule.

Yep, still seems strange, but it's the logic that works for me.

 

[psychotick]

Hi,

I'm the complete oppositeof everyone else here. I don't set out with a plot or a story at all. I start with a scene. Something that inspires me, and then I write it. Then once I've written that scene I just ask lots of questions - who is this person? Where did he come from? What happens next? Why is he doing what he's doing? And the book basically grows from there. Sometimes backwards because the scene I have is the final scene - as in The Overmen which is on my machine at the moment.

Cheers, Greg.

 

[Devor]

I've talked about all sorts of things, but for right now I only have a moment, so I'll talk about getting to just the concept, and not the full-fledged story.

I start with something that I think is really cool. It could be anything, but often it starts with trying to combine two or three raw ideas into something original, like say, "Parkour as a martial art." Then I try to think that through.

The first thing I think of with Parkour is kids jumping between buildings - which gives me character.

So I try to find ways to make that possible while keeping the exotic "martial arts"-type setting. That gives me a setting.

Then I need a villain that seems on par with kids doing Parkour - I thought city gangs, biker gangs. The villain gives me plot.

Putting that together lead me into the story I wrote for the Year of the Dragon Challenge, which I thought was an awesome concept.

 

[Darkfantasy]

Hello,
Normally with me it's a plot or a scene that will come first. Sometimes it's inspired by something, other times it seem to pop out of thin are. Normally characters come pretty quickly after that. Then the plot thickens as I think about it more and more. Then POV (would it be better in third or first. who should be my main character?) Then theme and setting.

That's when I start writing down what I have. I write the plot. Then I look at where it may be cliché or predictable and ask myself how I can change that. Does the plot fit with my imagined characters. Then plot, character and everything change as I work through my idea.

The final outline normally looks nothing like my original idea.

 

[oyler44]

I have a weird planning and outline style. For me it is like a puzzle. I have to assemble the entire thing before I write. During the writing a change alot but I normally stay true to my general scheme. It always starts with the world and how it is created. I actually draw a map of the world and name all the places first. Note that NOTHING is set in stone until the cover is put on it. Once the world is set, I define how it was created. Gods and such. Once that happens I develop one character. Putting out all the stops I make this character seem so real to me that I get excited talking about them as if they are my best friend. Then they need a primary enemy. After designing the nemesis I go into what other beings inhabit this world. So on and so forth until I have an entire world and civilization. Once I have that, I decide what this MC needs to learn. With a main target of lesson learned I develop how they will learn it. Then I ask myself questions. Who else needs to learn this lesson? How will the MC's nemesis try to prevent it? How will they overcome it? What will lead to the MC being CAPABLE of learning this lesson? Once I answer these I outline the story per chapter. Normally just a paragraph of events I want to take place. As I go on, I come back and add stuff to it that strikes me.

 

[Xitra_Blud]

When I write a story, I always see it as a movie before putting it to paper. Typically, I'll have a character first and I may fit the character into a scene and thus I'll have a character and a scene and before you know it's branched out into a whole story line. Some of them may come differently than others. I've never been able to do the outline style. I started writing because I always saw movies in my head and I felt like they needed to come down on paper (I've am also an aspiring filmmaker). I create stories/movies to entertain myself, really, but at some point I felt the need to write it down. I've always been an extremely picky reader, and I still very much am. When I was in school and we had a reading assignment I'd stay in the library for hours looking for something that I was willing to read. I'm the kind of person who very seldom reaches the end of a book, but I've always enjoyed my own work. Eventually it got to the point where I decided I was going to make my own story that was perfect and just for me. I remember being in the 7th grade and our teacher had us reading this absolutely boring story called "Homecoming". I never finished it and while I was "reading" it (if you're willing to call scanning through words reading), I recall myself watching one of my own works in my head so, in reality, I was reading my own work if that makes any sense at all. I'm still like that. Not to sound arrogant, but I tend to think my own stories and movies are the best. No one can entertain me like I can. Now, as far is if my writing style, sentence structure, etc. is all that great, I don't know, but I love the images I see in my head.

Anyway, that's how I went about doing. I watch them as movies first in my head. I see the beginning, middle, and end. Heck, I even hear score music at times, and if I feel like it is good enough to be told I'll tell it. Others, I just keep to myself

 

[Scribble]

I begin with a spiral notebook. I make bubble diagrams, linking one idea to another until something emerges that represents a story:

- characters (fictional people I come to care about)
- inciting incident (initial problem)
- conflict (what is really going on)
- transformation (what happens to the character in order to meet the challenges)
- awesomeness (world, magic, tech, etc...)

I start noodling around, adding characters, building relationships between characters, fleshing out their personalities, goals, fears, loves, etc...

The bubble diagrams become paragraphs.

I see if conflict emerges from the differences between the characters. Some may become antagonists, some may become foils, some may become allies, some might be secondary.

I build layers upon layers of things happening in the world. I create some history. I imagine some conflicts of interest.

The paragraphs multiply. A plot begins to emerge from the chaos. I'll begin to list out plot outlines, listing scenes in the order which makes sense at the time. I'll go back and revise plot lines several times as things occur to me.

Then, I imagine the scenes, I imagine the characters doing the things I've outlined. If I believe their motivation, I may be ready to list out scenes in detail. I may need to go back and flesh out characters more. I may need to refine the conflicts. I might find what worked in a diagram doesn't work when I try to imagine the scene. I keep going until it feels right.

This might take two weeks, one hour per day. Eventually, I have a full spiral notebook, jam packed with the "story" idea. I make an outline of all the scenes, 4-5 lines describing the action and dialogue.

Then, I sit down and try to type out the scenes as I've outlined. That's my roadmap.

Life dictates that I will be exhausted most of the time when I am ready to write. Thus, I make sure that I don't have to think too hard. I can just be creative about how I make the action happen, and I feel safe and fuzzy and warm with simple instructions.

Today, I had a scene outline as follows:

- Stowaway finds her way into Dr Kabal's rooms
- She finds all kinds of creepy things
- She discovers Dr Kabal, laying like a corpse
- She detects that he is ill, and heals him
- He discovers her power, and maneuvers for advantage
- He gives her a token as thanks, but it has some power to give him control over her (not sure what yet)

This isn't great, it's a first draft. Editing will make it much better. I just want to use it to illustrate the value of scene plotting. The prose might not be polished, but I think it makes for a cohesive result that I can work with later.

The kitchen had become too busy, she needed a new place to hide. The lock had not been much trouble, a kitchen knife and a bent fork tripped the tumblers and she was in. This room was dark, filled with crates and shelves. It was perfect. She was sure she would be found eventually, but so long as they were out and away, anywhere was preferable to this city.

Her eyes accustomed to the dim light, and she found it was not completely dark. Luminescent plants grew in pots. Books and scrolls spread out over tables, held down or held open by carved idols of wood and stone, faces of people, beasts, and demons. Strange and hideous things sat in jars. The twisted face of some unfortunate half-formed creature yawned silently in murky liquid. The sight of it set her skin crawling, and she backed away from it.

Her breath quickened, she tried to slow it by concentrating. She nearly had it under control, but startled when she backed into a crate. It was open, filled with something dark, like soil. She leaned over and smelled a queer, earthy smell. There was a sound, like a thousand ticking clocks. The dark mass inside the crate was moving. Beetles! They were masses of beetles, all climbing over each other.

Revulsion gripped her stomach, bringing her hand to her mouth reflexively. Anger at herself flushed her cheeks. She mastered her disgust and looked again. They were only insects, she told herself, there was nothing to be disgusted about. She smiled, watching the beetles go about their business.

A white arm shot out from beneath the beetles, gripping her wrist like cold iron. She scrabbled like a wild thing to get away from the hand. The hand was old, covered in spots and fleshless, all sinew and bone. A second white hand covered her mouth, stifling the shriek threatening to burst out. Her eyes went wide, all thoughts of escape, but the hands were like cold iron, they held her fast. Beetles fell away from the face as the figure struggled to sit up. Like the arms, the skin was white and leathery. The eyes appeared large and inquisitive. She squirmed to get free, but he held her fast.

Fear held her by the throat, then, she sensed his frailty. She saw within him, in his chest, a dark stain, a black core like a rotten peach. Within herself, she felt the bloom in her chest awaken, like a living flower speaking the language of living things. She felt his cells, old, near the end of their lives. Her awareness, like living tendrils flowed through his veins. His eyes grew large, and it was he now who felt helpless. His grip relaxed and he was held up, as if by invisible vines. The energy flowed out from the bloom in her breast to the black spot within him. In her mind, gold and green tendrils wrapped about the black spot, digging into it, breaking it up. Wherever the tendrils nudged in to the black spot, the ends decayed. She was losing strength. She could not eradicate it, but she could shrink it. She fought the black thing inside him, but at last she relented. Drained, she fell to the floor.

--

The colors before his eyes drifted away revealing the steam pipes running across the ceiling of his rooms. Steam hissed out a pressure release valve, misting the dark room. The Doctor lay back in his coffin of beetles, breathing heavy. He hauled himself over the side opposite her, and fell to the floor with a meaty smack. He reached up to the bench for his robe, and he pulled it over him. His pride returned to him slowly, but amazement kept it at bay. He wondered at the girl, where she had come from, and what she was doing here, and what exactly was it that she had done to him? He brushed away the questions like cobwebs, seeking clarity. She was one of the Awakened!

She was waking up, and though her eyes bore no fear, she drew away from him.

"I won't hurt you, child. Not after you've helped me."

The old man licked his dry lips with an oyster-white tongue. "I am Dr. Kabal. Who are you?"

"Shaila."

"You've got a rare talent, haven't you? I won't tell anyone about it. I promise." Kabal tried to smile like a kindly old man, aware than he must look more cadaverous than friendly, but she did not seem to be put off. "I'd like to give you something in thanks. Let me see..." Dr Kabal looked through boxes and drawers. "Aha! Here it is!" He held out a pendant on a brass chain. The stone was green, the setting resembled a beetle, highly stylized.

She accepted the pendant without speaking.

"Now, my curious little friend, how did you come here?"

The girl looked at her feet. Without looking up, she shook her head slowly.

"That's fine. Another time perhaps. Are you a stowaway?"

She nodded.

"Very well. I offer you my protection. The captain will not argue with me, not once we are in the air. You had best keep out of sight if you want to escape from Izarex. He may set you down in some village, but he'll not toss a young girl out in the air. It's not his character." Kabal made an attempt at a smile, aware he likely looked like a grinning skull. The girl did not seem disturbed, and gave him a wan smile in return. "Good then, keep out of sight until I tell you to come out."

 

[A. E. Lowan]

Our process is very organic, for all that I write with such very detailed outlines. We role play absolutely everything - world building, story development, character development, everything we research gets turned around and spun back out in role play - so usually what we start out with are the characters. All of our stories are very character driven, and we don't like writing in a "villain of the week" format, so our antagonists are just as enduring and well developed as our protagonists.

So, anyway, we start out with our characters, and throw them into conflict with each other and act everything out, the entire story from start to finish, completely organically, however long it takes. When we reach the end of the story, we usually give it a day or so to cool off, because our stories, being character driven, are pretty emotional and we need a bit of distance.

Then, we sit down with pen and paper - or more to the point I make my writing partner sit with pen and paper as my handwriting is actually banned in several states - and we go over the story again and this time we up the ante. We make it even more emotional, raise the stakes even higher because we have a bad habit when we rp of making things a bit too easy, and it's my writing philosophy that if our characters are having a good day we should be writing for Hello Kitty's Island Adventure. And by the time we're done with this we have a super-detailed outline that's really closer to pre-writing. For example the outline for our WIP, Faerie Rising, is 14 pages single spaced.

And then I take over. I do the actual drafting, because we want a single, cohesive voice. So I sit down with this monster of an outline, and I completely give over the reigns to the characters. I write deep POV and write by what I call "slipping into the character's skin." When I write I am the character, antagonist or protagonist, it makes no difference. So, by now I've spent enough time with the characters that even the ones that didn't originate with me, that belong to my writing partner, live part-time in my head, so I just let them run. I slip into their skins and let them take the lead. Even with an outline this detailed, they are able to maintain amazing agency and never cease to surprise me - they hit every point of stage direction I set out, but they do it on their terms. I'm just here for the ride.

 

[skip.knox]

I started with a core idea that gave me a world. Since it's alternate history, I already have the world half built, and I have about 2000 years to play around in, plus scores of plots and characters to choose from. It's really a matter of whether I want to write about Alfred the Great and his battles with dragons, or how a goblin horde destroyed a Roman army, or some lesser event like the struggles of an early alchemist. I may perish from a surfeit of plots.

Once I settle on a story, though, my process is a model of disorder. I try keeping notes on characters, settings, etc, but these change around so much that I soon wind up with a half dozen possibilities for each, all interconnected and all incomplete. I still haven't figured out how to bring order to that. I chalk it up to inexperience.

The same goes for the actual writing. I dive in and write and I roll along, but at some point my understanding of the story (see previous paragraph) evolves and I realize I should start the story later or earlier or elsewhere. Character B should be less whiny or more competent or maybe doesn't even need to exist. I do try to write a whole story, usually with gaping holes passing under the banner of First Draft. When I return for Version 2, I have many of those alternatives in mind and write a better story. But the holes still gape and it's still not finished and by golly I've got still other alternatives and I've probably brought Character B back in again.

And so it goes. Most of the difficulty turns on two points. One, character motivation. I need to be convinced the motives are believable, and this hinges in part on how much the character knows at any given point. The other difficulty comes out of purely physical considerations. Could the characters win this fight? They might need to be at Place A, but also be at Place B. I put them in a prison and, really, they couldn't get out. Everything I try feels contrived. So I start thinking maybe they don't need to be in that prison, or get in that fight, or maybe they could all be at Place C instead.

I need to learn how to think narrowly, to find the one and only one option. Instead, I think broadly, and come up with endless possibilities, which in turn means I have yet to find an end.

 

[buyjupiter]

I'm mostly a by the seat of my pants kind of writer. I outline, but I leave enough wiggle room so that I don't know how things happen exactly. If I know down to the color of the curtains level of detail about a situation, I get bored. And when I get bored, I write boring "and then this stuff happened."

I only do a formal outline if it's an idea that I can't work on today, but I want to make sure that when I have time to write it, I can pick it up and just do it. Otherwise, I would rather pants it for the first few pages and do a messy "and then and then and then" kind of planning process, that involves a lot of cutting and pasting. Because, my brain doesn't manage to think linearly at all.

I start writing with a "what if" idea. I don't usually have a character in mind when I start. I have to find one pretty quickly, but that kind of comes about by thinking about what kind of personality would have difficulties with the problem I have in mind. Then I build a basic character. I have no idea what they look like at first, but I have a good sense of who they are at the core of their being. Then I add the layers that people use to hide and deflect attention from their inner selves. The cynic, who is at heart really an optimist, but who feels that they have to be "tough". That kind of thing.

I consider plot/character to almost be the same thing, as I think character is a reaction to plot and plot is a reaction to character. World building/setting is kind of farther down the list, as I consider mood and theme to be a little more important to get right before I tackle getting the setting right. (I have one exception to this so far, but the story was entirely derived from a setting that I thought up.)

I try really hard to keep my personal beliefs in the background as much as I possibly can. I loathe preachy writing, whether it's actually religion based or not. However, I do want to read stories about people from diverse backgrounds, so if I can authentically write about different experiences from my own world view I want to do that. All of that said, I'm going to write about issues that I'm very much wrangling with at the moment.

As much as I don't really like it, I think that for me at least, theme is the most important thing. I've managed to transport a character from a modern Earth setting to a fantasy ice kingdom, change him from a everyday kind of guy to a barbarian, and changed the format from a one act play to a short story. Through all of these changes the theme is still very much an exploration of love, loss, and falling in love again with a person who's hurt him badly. (And kind of surprisingly, the character hasn't really suffered from all the changes I've put him through. He's still, in essence, the same guy who popped into my head when I first imagined him.)

 

[The Rivan King]

The first thing I think about is how I see the protaginist in my head, what do they wear, how do they stand, how to they compose themselves. Then I think about the world and setting, some history and lore about the world and let mtself get immersed in the world and my mind. The plot and supporting characters or little extras come while I write

 

[Malik]

I've been working on the same project for so long that I just put the characters into situations and write down what they do.

My primary fuel is Pandora One, rye on ice, and bad Chinese food -- the stuff you get at Safeway.

The key for me, though, is to have my own space away from the world. When I have the door to my office closed, I am not to be disturbed unless there's a threat to someone's life, limb, or eyesight. Our house is an old barn that we renovated, and we used antique, solid hardwood doors on all the rooms. My office door closes like a bank vault and the place is like a tomb, with triple-paned windows and 2" wooden exterior walls. Eventually, my mind gets so quiet that I can just see what's happening in my fantasy world and make notes. Which, I know, sounds slightly schizophrenic. Cope.

Also, a comfortable office chair made all the difference in the world. Invest in one. It will make you want to plunk your butt down and write.